Twilight of Our Despair

"And I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered, it will reach you everywhere." - L. Cohen

An interesting pattern is developing in the responses we're receiving from people, as we go out into the world to talk with strangers and acquaintances alike about the upcoming hazards of global climate change. A few, like us, are already following the developments with dismay and bravery, preparing to act when the ripe moment reveals itself. Others are tuned out, vaguely familiar with the concern, where it flits on the periphery in the company of remote possibilities like the explosion of the Yellowstone super-caldera, or the fissure of the Canary Islands leading to a massive tsunami that flattens the cities of the Atlantic Rim.

A surprisingly -- no, unconscionably -- large number of people seem to be in a state of flat-out denial about the freight-train of global warming that is riding the rails on a collision course with our way of life, while we play chicken on the tracks. A fair number of these people are so-called progressive thinkers, individuals who in virtually every other case stand for social justice, honoring the environment, championing the way of social collectivism over competition, and highlighting the forgotten, the broken, the ruined people and places, as we charge toward development and "greater" wealth.

However, when it comes to climate change, they retreat to alternative explanations for the evidence that were maybe plausible ten or 15 years ago, but have been soundly eliminated from consideration as major causes of the surge in the Greenhouse Effect. They continue to pounce on the wildly overblown controversy of "Climategate," as if that teapot tempest ever represented a legitimate reason to doubt the great volume of evidence illustrating climate change. Melting glaciers and ice-sheets get a ho-hum, as if we were beset by a kind of fatigue and will just deal with it later, deal with later.

Some of us continue to fly to the outrageous lie that climate scientists are in a vast conspiracy to earn vast amounts of grant money by hyping a bogus theory of global warming, or by setting the stage for the widespread promotion of alternative energy. Proponents cling to obscure data to support this -- for instance, that Al Gore was, in 2009, reportedly set to become the world's first "carbon billionaire," thanks to his investments in green energy companies -- despite that Occam's Razor suggests the much greater likelihood is that already-made carbon billionaires such as William Koch are orchestrating a deliberate plan of misinformation on climate change.

 Leave alone that men (and women) like William Koch seek, at every turn, to deny the truth of global warming. The Global Humanitarian Forum, founded by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, calculates that 300,000 people currently lose their lives every year due to climate change, and that number will climb to 500,000 or more by 2030. More people killed by global warming than by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, yet we change nothing -- nothing -- about our daily routines. Why?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17218-climate-change-could-kill-500000-a-year-by-2030.html

There are some straight-forward reasons why people are not treating climate change as the unequivocal disaster that it is. The first reason is that, as a matter of public policy, the whole affair has been handled terribly. I do not say that as a discredit to the scientists that have obviously worked long and hard to refine their experiments and scenarios, and glean ever-more certain projections from the data. But, let's hope that if the World Health Organization ever has to deal with a pandemic on the scale of global warming, they act with a lot more certainty than the International Panel on Climate Change has done.

Most people's information about climate change is about twelve years out-of-date (aside from hearing warnings, out-of-context, that the arctic ice has melted more than ever before this summer, or that polar bears will die out soon, and a few items of that nature). Twelve years ago, the approach that the IPCC took to modeling climate change was much more open-ended. Several future scenarios were plotted out for what our future carbon gas emissions might be like, depending on what way society evolves in the 21st century, and a target of 2º C total rise in average temperature was chosen, largely for political reasons. It would be yet far in the future, according to the scenarios, when the Earth would be approaching that temperature, and the date by which we would necessarily have cut our emissions significantly was comfortably far out – 2050. Even still, it took until 2009 to get all major countries (including the U.S.) to agree to those reductions by 2050...and those are non-binding.

Twelve years ago, and even in 2007, the publicly reported debate around the IPCC's summary reports centered on whether to officially declare climate change as “unlikely” or “likely” caused by human actions, and whether it was “extremely unlikely,” or merely  “unlikely” to take us into dangerous temperatures, if we delayed our mitigation efforts until much closer to 2050. No wonder people tuned out.

Scientists being scientists, the IPCC members were very reluctant to declare that any weather extremes we are experiencing currently are connected to climate change, and they spent a good deal of time trying to demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that our civilization's CO₂ emissions are contributing to rising temperatures. They also worked meticulously to show that temperatures are rising, that they are closely correlated to CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere.

In the meantime, they were terribly circumspect about it. The oil, coal, and gas industries used the lack of decisive statements from the IPCC, the fractured Kyoto Protocol, and the dearth of political leadership, as opportunity to push back with denial of climate change, and misinformation in the form of false graphs and cherry-picked data-sets that give the impression that global temperature is stable, or even falling.

Later, as the collected evidence grew that global warming is most definitely real and dangerous, these industries employed scientists to engage in the creation and promotion of spurious theories to explain rising temperatures, including sunspots, decreased aerosols in the atmosphere, or that temperature naturally varies more than the IPCC allows for; they focus on such events as the medieval “Little Ice Age,” or the warm spell during Roman times.

If you are confused, that is exactly the point. These scientist-lobbyists were hired to muddy the waters, many of them are not experts in climatology. Unfortunately, their wrong information, as well as misleading charts and graphs, are still widely available on the internet.

It took the IPCC seven years to declare that people do indeed make global warming happen.

The carbon-fuel industries should not be forgiven. They tricked lay-people into a complicit negligence of the issue, on a par with the willful ignorance by ordinary Germans (not to mention Americans) of Nazi atrocities, as they were happening. Sadly, in this case, the scale of the consequences will be far larger.

However, confusion and doubt are not enough to explain our current ostrich behavior. For at least the last four years, we have known that the IPCC's future scenarios are way off the mark in terms of how hot things are going to get, how bad the consequences will be. What is more, we have pretty specific information available now on what we must do if we want to manage a survivable outcome to this emergency, and how little time we have to do it. Our politicians (at least in the U.S.) don't mention it, take no action on this information, and they get away with it because...why? Because nobody cares? Because we are, in the final analysis, really unwilling to go without our SUVs and jet planes, and abundant electricity in our “climate-controlled” buildings? Are we really unwilling to move our truck shipping industry to rail, or scale it back, and have local economies?

People say that we have not the backbone of the generation that endured World War II, which, in addition to all-out fighting and the largest relocation of refugees in history, also engendered rationing of food and basic supplies. However, in talking with people about climate change recently, I see, in our defense of our homes and our cars and our lifestyles, not greed and mere convenient rationalization so much as compartmentalization, the walling-off of some basic, natural response to the situation.

My guess is that we are, in the heart of our natural selves, aware of the Earth still, and, like prodigal children, we are ashamed to return to the bedside of our dying parent. Our grief is too great to listen to what intimate words she would whisper to us. She might even forgive us. It is possible that we are not paying attention to global warming because we feel that we deserve to be punished somehow, and we invite the end of our species with a kind of gleeful abandon.

Many of the people alive now to confront this most pressing issue have grown up steeped in the knowledge of our transgressions against the planet. The litany is torture for the soul: deforestation, the extinction of many creatures that were cute and fuzzy or fantastically wonderful, and the extinction of many more whose names and features we barely knew, variations on the theme of beetle or fish or bird. We have lately become aware of the great raft of plastic debris that has gathered in the middle of each ocean, almost too big to fathom how it ever got there. Did we really do that? We have devastated mountains, manhandled waterways the world over, drawn the fresh water down to the bone, in many places. We have synthesized thousands upon thousands of chemical compounds, and used them heavily, their by-products and residues landing in the water, the air, and the soil of the Earth.

The same period that has seen us increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has also seen us dramatically degrade the beauty, intricacy, and wholeness of the environment that holds us. It seems that we, most of us, must carry a great, largely unspoken, grief for such ruination. At best, we channel our sorrow into tenderness for our gardens, a favorite tree, a fondness for natural materials, a hike in the wild spaces now and then.

Some transform their lives so that they can return to the fold of nature, it is true. But, we don't have a cultural forum for sharing our feelings of horror and sadness for the genocide and vandalism we have done. We are left with an undercurrent sense of something wrong, that accumulates in the morass of sadness about the state of the Earth.

We read in the news as people in more powerful positions make strange bargains about what matters and what doesn't matter, what is precious and what is not, on a very big scale. Every day, they have the effect of millions upon the environment. Try to understand why, and all that you or I have for comparison are small awkward moments where we exert the fiat of our whims upon our personal environment: pouring a toxic chemical down the drain, driving when we could have walked, spraying the walk with herbicide and hoping it fades into the environment before the children or pets encounter it. We know we all make compromises. Our hearts hurt when corporate industry makes big ones on our behalf. But,  big and small, all the kinds of sins we have committed against nature leave perpetrators and witnesses alike feeling dirty and broken. It adds up. We are so tempted to hide.

We need venues where we can take an honest accounting of what we've done to the environment, without conspiracy theories and without trying to shift the responsibility. We need to support each other when the tidal wave of that collective realization comes to the surface.

The irony is that, if we're going to do something meaningful to contain climate change, we don't actually have time to linger in grief. When we share our sorrow, and it seems that we must do, we need to move, as quickly as we can, to a place where we remember that we rightfully belong in the infinite fragility of this planet, devoting our power and love to it, rather than spinning out the story of our fall from grace, in the shadows. 

-by Gavain U'Prichard

What Do We Do?

We face a moment of change that puts to shame, in sheer scale, all the other changes of our 10,000 year civil history. By the best available models, in three years time from now our burning of carbon-based greenhouse gas (at least in already industrialized countries) will have needed to peak out, and start on a dramatic downswing (4% per year reduction in use of fuels like gasoline, 9% per year reduction in carbon-based electrical energy generation). If we could do that, there is a chance that we could limit the eventual total concentration of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million. (What that means, basically, is that, out of every one million molecules of air, oxygen, nitrogen, methane, ozone etc.,  450 of those would be carbon-dioxide).

If we wait until, say, 2020, to make those changes, the eventual concentration will rise to 550-650 ppm, or more. Let it be known, though, that the carbon cuts described above are so severe, given the ultra-short time-frame, that no government is seriously considering making them, at this point. These kind of reductions are far removed from the tepid negotiations being eked out at the international climate summits in the past few years. Effectively, the human species has made no advancement in reining ourselves in, so that we may meet this austere carbon budget.

However, the result of even 450 ppm concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere is not mild. It will yield a global average temperature change somewhere in the range of 3-4º centigrade, which leads to big sea-level changes, the creation of massive deserts, and the probable extinction of 50% or more of species of life on Earth. Climatologists have now revised the “climate disaster” scale, if you will, so that a 3-4º rise is firmly in the realm of “beyond dangerous” global warming. An eventual concentration of 550ppm would likely lead to a 6º change in global temperature, and 660pm – that much more so.

So, folks: by some of the newest studies (2008, 2011), we've got three to five years left to put our oar in, steer the global industrial juggernaut in the opposite direction from which it is currently headed, which is the exponential increase in the release of CO₂ as a by-product of its labors. It also means that we've got a mere handful of years to radically alter our lives.

On the political plane, it is clear that we need to signal our willingness, as the citizens-at-large, to support the governmental decisions that will bring about abrupt changes to our way of life, no matter how austere the circumstances become...if we want a future. The most powerful way to signal this willingness, other than through electoral politics, is by bringing our own lifestyle choices to bear, en masse, on the commercial-corporate world that has engineered our wants, the products that amplify those wants, and, indeed, encroached on our definitions of life-worth-living.

When I was about nine years old, my parents and I watched the sci-fi camp-horror movie, “The Stuff.” It is a dry commentary on our mindless consumption: deep underground, in a mine, a delicious substance is discovered. It is quickly made into a commercial dessert product, and, soon, millions of Americans are hooked on it. Problem is, it turns out that “The Stuff” is a parasitic goo, which corrodes the inside of its would-be consumers, and leaves their bodies as hollow shells.

The scene that stands out particularly in my mind is one where a young boy, who learns that the Stuff is a threat to everyone who consumes it, is standing in a supermarket, at the head of an aisle whose shelves are lined with the product. After taking a deep breath, he pulls out a stick, and charges down the aisle, knocking every bottle of the Stuff to the floor. Of course, the managers of the store, not to mention the customers, are outraged, and attempt to apprehend the boy so that he may face justice.

People who call attention to the knife's edge condition of our climate are subjected to a similar degree of consternation as well, even though the thanklessness of what they are doing should be evidence enough that their motivations are altruistic, that they are acting for the good of all. Like those addicted to the Stuff, we partake of our pleasures even though we know that we have no right to them, so long as we can pretend that the consequences are invisible. In this way, extreme consumption is normalized, and we are all fooling ourselves. In France, there is reportedly a delicacy which consists of a rare songbird, eaten whole; it is customary for the gourmand to hide beneath his napkin while he devours this creature, to hide his sin from God. In the case of our carbon pollution, we are all hiding under the napkin together.

If the consequences of driving a car for frivolous reasons – say, to go down the block to the convenience store – were obvious, we would have the moral compunction not to do it. If a nuclear bomb exploded somewhere in the world every time we turned the ignition key, a lot of cars would sit silent. But, the truth is that we are inviting a future every bit as dire as the feared “nuclear winter” that went along with Mutually Assured Destruction during the Cold War, and that future is coming as a promised guest. We are, every day, mutually assuring each other of our destruction, of widespread hunger, exile, death, but we pretend that this is normal.

Until recently, cigarette smoking was also normal, it was accepted as a right to smoke socially, and smoking was cool, while being concerned about it was decidedly not. That has now changed. We need a similar change about our obsession with new things, with comfort, with convenience, about the easy way we justify all of our personal decisions, no matter how outlandish the cost to others. We need to stop living in isolation, not knowing our neighbors, not having real conversations with each other, because isolation leads to the twin false perceptions, a) that I really am alone (so how can my contribution impact anything?), and b) that I am the center of my own universe, and what I think is important is important.

We don't have the time-frame that we had to change public opinion about smoking. We don't have enough people charging down the aisles, shattering our illusions of normality when we're dancing on the brink.

Vote Romney, Vote Death

Now, I know that the title of this post probably sounds to some of you like rank partisan hyperbole. However, I mean it quite literally. And it's not because Mitt is evil. (Though, it is because he is Republican.)

Here's the reason. Mitt says this 2012 presidential election is about the economy. Actually, he says it is only about the economy. Most Republicans, and many Democrats, are right in sync with him on that opinion. Unfortunately, they are wrong.

The economy sags like a poorly whipped meringue, and millions of people fear for the loss of their livelihoods, yet in the wings of this presidential election, hardly mentioned, sits the issue that will stomp the meringue to mush, and bankrupt our entire future on this planet, not to mention half (or more) of all the other species with whom we share it.

New calculations show us we have a bare 5-10 years to make any closing argument we care to, in the great narrative of how we dramatically -- stupefyingly -- affected the climate in the 20th, and early 21st, century. Natural amplifications of our human contributions to the planet's Greenhouse Effect are about to kick in. As it stands, we will send the planet's average temperature soaring to 6-12º C above pre-industrial temperatures – a climatic situation Earth last recreated 30 million years ago. We may even see a condition of irreversible global warming, which will take us into the climatic end-game that the planet Venus has demonstrated for us.

In these next 5-10 years, the world has to not only reach the zenith of its fossil fuel burning, but severely reduce it as well...and that's just to keep temperatures within a very uncomfortable, but perhaps endurable, 3-4º C above pre-industry averages.

Whoever is president for the next 4-8 years will wield the executive clout to make that final argument. They will likely command Western Civilization's best hope at curbing our excesses. At the end of their term, the die will more or less be cast.

Now, consider Mitt Romney in this role. Mitt Romney is a dyed-in-the-wool business man. Even longtime close associates of his family admit that, whereas his father, Governor George Romney, was a natural leader, Mitt Romney is more of a manager – and maybe a middle manager at that. Then there's this: his election campaign is being bankrolled by the likes of billionaire carbon magnate William Koch (the third Koch brother), who considers the EPA “hyperaggressive” in going after carbon pollution. In return for securing him the presidency, Koch expects Romney to follow through with a personal promise to cripple agency regulation of greenhouse gases, if not to mortally wound it. How much access to a Romney presidency would these guys feel entitled to? Another billionaire funding Romney's campaign put it this way: “I would expect Mitt Romney to speak to me occasionally.”

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/right-wing-billionaires-behind-mitt-romney-20120524

Finally, there is Romney's stated stance on climate change: one of skepticism or denial. Oren Cass, Romney's domestic policy advisor, said, “[Romney] doesn't know the extent to which climate change is occurring or that human activity is causing it." The incredible thing about this is that, as governor, Mitt Romney was a leader in executive activism on climate change, and several of his advisors on the subject are now part of Obama's adminstration, trying to do something about global warming.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/13/nation/la-na-romney-energy-20120613

Mitt Romney as president would use our last years to officially doubt the existence of climate change, even though he is fully aware of its reality. Unless his true, liberal self is hiding inside the trojan horse of his new-found conservatism, Romney will not be our captain through the very difficult waters we have to navigate these next 5-10 years, if we are to stand a chance in the future. Unfortunately, Romney really does seem to believe that the economy – and, particularly, securing the freedom of every enterprising and somewhat unscrupulous businessman to get as much money as possible while he can – is the most important game at play on planet Earth at this moment.

Now consider a continued presidency of Obama. He is not Al Gore, when it comes to climate change. On the other hand, he was a community worker; he does have some firsthand experience of struggling uphill for a thankless cause. He, also, would be a second-term president, having “flexibility,” as he notoriously put it to Vladimir Putin, to “[make] something happen.” It is possible – especially if he really is the raving nutter radical that Republican pundits make him out to be – that he would have the gumption to do something really unprecedented, like declare martial law and issue an executive order allowing the seizure of assets from the carbon fuel companies.

So far, he, too, has been promising to proceed full-tilt into as many domestic drilling, fracking, mining opportunities as the under-budgeted EPA will allow. But it is (slightly) more plausible that Obama is pulling our leg, hiding in plain sight, and when push comes to shove, he will remember his message of hope, or at least the future of his daughters' generation, and do what needs to be done. 


 

The Moment We've Been Waiting For

Here we go! There are certain moments when the direction of human history reaches a crossroads, and even people at the time know it is happening. There has never really been a moment where human history and planetary history reached a crossroads at the same time — until now. The climate is changing.

 

In its long history, our planet has gone through many eras that were starkly different from what life on Earth is like now. There have been times when the Earth was mostly a searing desert, times when water covered much more of the planet than it does now, times when most of the world was a jungle, and yet other times when great portions of the globe were under an ice sheet two miles thick.

The vast differences in these environments, and the length of time that the planet featured any particular climate, boggle our human imaginations. Human history seems like a long time to us, but it is merely the smallest mark at the very end of an immensely long ruler that represents the time-line of Earth’s history. Take Wyoming, for instance — Wyoming has variously been a desert, lush forest, a sea, and an ice block. Our presumption that we “know” Wyoming, and how to live for generations upon that land (including into the future), is like the arrogance of meeting a person and concluding after thirty seconds that you can speak with certainty about how the rest of their life will unfold.

For ages upon ages, far longer than humans have walked the Earth, conditions on the ground were such that our life and civilization as we know it would have been impossible to carry out. We may now be inaugurating the next great era of Earth’s history, with its own climate — one that may well be inhospitable to us (and many of the animals and plants we’ve grown to love). And perhaps the most astonishing thing about this is that we are the ones creating the change. In fact, there’s good reason to believe that we have only a handful of remaining years to decide whether we, the human species, are going to throw our collective weight of technology and personal habits into continuing the present era of relatively benign, even life-friendly conditions, that we have enjoyed for the last 12,000 years…or whether we are going to continue engaging in behaviors that dramatically change life on Earth, for thousands, maybe millions, of years to come.

For the last 150 years or so, we’ve been having a very noticeable effect on our planet’s atmosphere. We are now nearing the culmination of that unintended process. If we act now, the average temperature on Earth may — with luck — top out at a 2° Centigrade (3.6° F) rise over its pre-industrial temperature. This, of course, does not mean that most locations will only experience a rise of 2° or so. Global average temperature is held steady by consistently low temperatures at the poles, at least so far. Regionally, temperature fluctuations will get very wild, as we have seen.

The global average temperature has already risen 0.8° C (1.4° F) since the dawn of the internal combustion engine. As I write this, we are experiencing the longest run of steady rising in seasonal temperatures in recorded history, vast areas of drought, other areas of flooding, a 30% increase in the acidification of world’s oceans, an increase in violent, landscape-changing storms. The reordering of the Earth’s surface into a very different network of environments from what we’re used to, the changing of the so-familiar global wind and water currents: these things are well under way already. A further rise of 1.8° C (3.24° F) will make much of the familiar landscape and weather patterns unrecognizable, perhaps uninhabitable.

We have sixteen years, at most. Three cycles of the United States presidency. Even that is a startlingly short amount of time in which to leverage such a colossal choice. However, that sixteen year estimate is wildly generous, and doesn’t factor in that we have not yet seen the total rise in Earth’s temperature resulting from the greenhouse gases we’ve added in the last 30 years or so. (People have, in fact, been increasing our carbon gas emissions exponentially.) Given that we haven’t fully reaped what we’ve already sown as of yet, it is highly likely that the time-frame we have to alter our planet’s future is even shorter than 16 years — very, very short. One of the leading climatologists for the International Panel on Climate Change recently figured that we have maybe five to ten years to do something, if that. This is why we are calling it a crossroads that dwarfs all other singular events in human history up until now. For, the consequences of that choice will be felt all over this blue-green planet, and will set the tone for a longer period of time than we can really even imagine.

If, during the next sixteen years (at most), we are still pouring greenhouse gases into the air, it is likely that we will set into motion further cascading releases of naturally stored greenhouse gases (in the frozen tundra, for instance), and we won’t be able to stop that. The Earth’s climate is regulated by a very complex system of variables, many that loop back into the system to affect other variables. The result is that the climate tends to settle out at different stable points, but not the points in between. Some of the warmer stable points next up the thermometer from where we are now are big intervals. In other words, if we can’t stop at 2° C warmer, the next time that the climate settles down might be at 6° C warmer. There are times in Earth’s remote past when the world was that hot…and the storms that ravaged the Earth, the rising seas, the droughts that happened then would make todays climate seem like a petting zoo by comparison.

So what do we do? Well, on a personal level, the logical answer would be: if you like your lifestyle the way it is now, stop participating in the continued release of greenhouse gases (primarily by halting your use of carbon fossil fuels). But therein lies the tricky part. For most of us, stopping our use of gasoline and diesel for our cars, trucks, lawnmowers, ATVs, boats, tractors, ceasing our dependence on coal-fired electricity, heating oil, boycotting the internet trade industry that relies on shipping goods in diesel trucks, not using the thousands of products that require burning massive amounts of carbon fuels in their manufacture, all of that would entail and end to our way of life as it is now. So, either way, we are facing the end of our familiar, well-constructed habits and enjoyments, the end of an American Dream that things just get easier and more convenient, generation after generation.

There are, though, advantages, to choosing to change your lifestyle rather than have Nature thrust the necessity upon you, and/or kill you in the process. You get to pilot your life into new territory now, with as much grace and joy and freedom as you can create, rather than have the floor pulled out from under you.

Are there alternatives? Well, you might be tempted to hope that some scientists and engineers somewhere are devising a method of mitigating the greenhouse effect (and there are, indeed, people working on that).  However, there are large issues to be solved.  Technical aspects of implementing any of these fixes have to be tried out and improved. The U.N. or some other body needs to establish who has jurisdiction to combat rising temperatures. Not to mention, we may well have to deal with the unintended consequences of any cure put into action. We have scant time to work out these details.

That also doesn’t take into account the other issue.

Unfortunately, there are people right now, people in the highest positions of corporations that are the point-source of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, who are unwilling to change their behavior in the next sixteen years. They’re not willing to change their companies’ purposes or business models because they hold, in asset, more than five times the amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere and still hope to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2° C. In fact, they have already borrowed money against those future profits (and those promised profits are, of course, what is driving their stock prices). The lifestyle that money buys for these barons of fossil fuels features indoor climate control, lavish beauty, and mindless ignorance of — or stunning callousness toward — the plight of those affected by global warming, which already includes millions of Saharan Africans who are fleeing the aggressive sprawl of that desert, islanders who know with certainty that rising oceans will make their very homes disappear beneath the waves, farmers in the U.S. midwest who are watching the worst drought in 70 years unfold as week after week of dry, sunny, 104° F days play out in an unending chain this summer. That does not mention all the people who will be affected by climate change in the future, which — if these millionaires get their way — will be just about everyone.

So, the millionaires (and many Billionaires) are actively organizing and pulling the strings of the American political/business power system to dismantle the few regulations that might hold them in check. It is, therefore, not enough to hope that some engineers will create a program of climate remediation in the mext 16 years. It is not enough, even, to make the changes to our personal lives (deeply altering though they may be).The only thing, it seems, that will really give us the power to choose whether or not we unleash a new climatic era upon the Earth, is powerful activism. I don’t mean just sign holding, chanting in solidarity, or occupying symbolic locations (although those all are important tools). This campaign must have teeth, must be able to get a grip on the status quo and rip it to shreds. It needs parallel streams of  action. First, we need people who are able to engage the companies that extract more and more fossil carbon for the purpose of burning it,  challenging them, with expertise, at every turn. We need a stream of people pledging their support for a government intervention in this industry, by means of martial law and executive order, if necessary. Finally, we need to work together to make the radical changes to our individual lives so that we can personally divest ourselves of our carbon burning regime.

Consider the other crossroads in history we have experienced. Although they are far smaller in scale than the one we come to now, they offer us the only lessons by example that we can study. Suppose, for instance, the passengers on flight 93, the fourth plane to be hijacked on September 11, 2001, had not summoned the courage to do whatever necessary to wrest control of that plane from the suicidal martyrs in control of it. Having learned that the other three planes were flown into buildings, to catastrophic effect, and determining that their aircraft was headed for the District of Columbia, the passengers looked outside of their own plight, set aside their regret, called upon each other for strength, and took that airplane into the ground before it could do greater damage.The terrorists were meaning to strike at our finances and the symbols of our way of life. The threat we now face is much, much more immense, and it is not symbolic; it is visceral. We must step away with grace from our attachments and our venality, and remember what is truly important, or we shall all lose much that is precious.

Follow Up Gathering in Chicago Tomorrow, 11/29

We are sponsoring a free gathering following up on Bill McKibben's appearance with the "Do the Math" tour this evening in Chicago. Come discuss what did and did not get said at tonight's presentation, and look at what other strategies besides divestment we can call on to take fossil fuels out of the driver's seat of our economy and society.

Some questions we will discuss:

Is it still even possible to limit global temperature increase to +2º C?

What time-frame do we have in which to act? Is it 15 years? 8 years? 4 years?

How steeply do we really need to cut greenhouse gas emissions if we're actually going to stay under a +2º C temperature rise?

We will be meeting at:

Uncommon Ground (on Clark)

3800 North Clark Street, Chicago

6 - 8 pm

We look forward to meeting more of our regional climate activists, hearing your perspective on this unique moment in Earth's history, and discussing what we're going to do about it. Please call us at (281) 235-7601 if you plan on attending, as space is limited.  Alternately, please call:  541-942-8473